I have a stereo acoustic guitar recording where I would like to improve the timing, either by quantising or manual use of audio warp, but I can't edit both recordings separately because this will lose phase accuracy.

Is there any way in Cubase of setting up a master/slave relationship between two clips so that any editing to one is applied to the other automatically? Or does anyone have an alternative solution to this problem?

A true stereo file is perfectly able to be warped in Cubase with no phase concerns. The two sides will remain phase locked at all times.

Do I take it that you actually have two separate mono files? If so I would begin by converting them to a single stereo file, and load this file into a stereo Cubase Track. From there you should have no trouble doing what you're wanting.

TBH it's quite an odd thing to do to record the left and right of a stereo recording on separate mono tracks in Cubase. If it's stereo then record it as a stereo track.

To convert to a stereo file within Cubase- Create a temporary stereo output in the Audio Connections dialogue.- Route your two mono tracks, panned fully left/right respectively, to the temporarily created stereo output.- Create a stereo Audio Track in Cubase and set its input to be the temporary stereo output you created above.- Ensure that you have removed all processing, EQ, etc, from the source mono tracks and also set all the track faders to unity.- Record the output of the temporary stereo output back into the Cubase stereo Track.- Clean up after yourself and remove the temporary stereo output.

The Elf wrote:TBH it's quite an odd thing to do to record the left and right of a stereo recording on separate mono tracks in Cubase.

If an acoustic is recorded with two different mics in different positions for different flavours/perpectives, they may well be panned for a stereo effect, but may be mixed at different levels - ie. not a true ‘stereo’ track, so independent control is often desirable. They would still need to be edited as one, much in the same way as (for instance) a multitrack drum kit recording.

I assume Cubase doesn’t require the discrete drum tracks to be mixed to stereo before editing? Or have I missed something here? I agree that it’s rather unnecessary to record both sides of a true stereo array on two separate mono channels unless forced to.

Assuming this is simply a pair of mono channels that constitute a stereo recording I see no point in splitting the file back to mono once you have it as a stereo file. Just keep it as stereo.

More channels can be handled by one of the 'surround' formats, again enabling you to create and manipulate a single file, avoiding phase problems. I'm not sure of the maximum number of surround channels Cubase supports as a single file... Maybe the manual can tell you?

If you try to edit multiple drum tracks, providing you use Cubase's multi-track quantise only you should be OK. You will run into trouble with FreeWarp, especially if you believe that grouping and linking will save you - it won't.

True Multi-track, phase-locked FreeWarp is something I've been asking Steinberg to implement for several years, with not even so much as an acknowledgement for my pains.

forumuser939850 wrote:In Cubase, you can link multiple tracks together, e.g. for multimic drum recordings so that what you do on one track is applied to the others. Does that work for you?

As I mentioned above, that will work with multi-track quantise (and cut edits, though I've not found it to be reliable), but it won't work with Free Warp. If quantise alone will fix what needs to be fixed you may get away with it, but if you need to move a few warp points around the changes will not be synced.

Sorry, I should have been more clear in the original post - the mics were not in a true stereo X-Y pair but sited at different places with a view to capturing different tones. They may be processed slightly differently hence the need for separate tracks.

Back at base one of my first actions is to combine various tracks into stereo composites to aid in the mix/edit. That combining may include adjusting the width - ie not always panned hard L/R - but not much else. EQ twiddling and combined level adjustment is not done until I can hear how that (stereo) track is sitting in the mix.

Richard Benn wrote:Sorry, I should have been more clear in the original post - the mics were not in a true stereo X-Y pair but sited at different places with a view to capturing different tones. They may be processed slightly differently hence the need for separate tracks.

Ah! That's a bit different, then. I'd probably still leave them as a single stereo file, but send the left and right to separate mono sub-groups so you can still edit/adjust without worrying about phase, but also have each mono signal available in the Groups to adjust as necessary - best of both worlds.